Archbot flagged a "blocker" on a PR. It cited the diff, built a plausible chain of reasoning, and suggested a fix. It was completely wrong. Not "LLMs are sometimes wrong" wrong — more like convincing enough that a senior engineer spent 20 minutes disproving it . The missing detail wasn't subtle. It was a guard clause sitting in a helper two files away. Archbot just didn't have that file. That failure mode wasn't a prompt problem. It was a context problem . So I stopped trying to pr...

Suppose that you have a record of your sales per day. You might want to get a running record where, for each day, you are told how many sales you have made since the start of the year. day sales per day running sales 1 10$ 10 $ 2 15$ 25 $ 3 5$ 30 $ Such an operation is called a prefix sum or a scan. Implementing it in C is not difficult. It is a simple loop. for ( size_t i = 1 ; i data [ 1 ] -> data [ 2 ] -> .....

I didn’t start out as a designer. I started out as a frontend developer. I cared about the craft and spent a lot of time trying to master HTML, CSS, JavaScript and accessibility. Over time, I learned how these technologies affected UX, so as a dev, I started to suggest design changes to improve usability and accessibility. But most of the designers I worked with ignored my suggestions. Years later I transitioned to design. I tried to hide my engineering past because I was worried oth...

In my graduate Ramsey Theory class I taught Kruskal's tree theorem (KTT) which was proven by Joe Kruskal in his PhD thesis in 1960.  (Should that be in a graduate Ramsey Theory class? There are not enough people teaching such a course to get a debate going.) A simpler proof was discovered (invented?) by Nash-Williams in 1963. The theorem is that the set of trees under the homeomorphism ordering is a well quasi order. But this blog post is not about well quasi orderings. It's about baseball brot...

All good things must come to an end, and today is that day for one of my projects, the 512kb Club . I started the 512kb Club back in November 2020, so it's been around 5.5 years. It's become a drain and I'm ready to move on. As of today I won't be accepting any new submissions to the project. At the time of writing this, there are 25 PRs open for new submissions, I'll work through them, then will disable the ability to submit pull requests. Over the years there have been nearly 2,000 pull r...

Have you heard that the age of hyper-personal software is upon us? Typically what people mean is that agentic AI allows the creation of simple and small software built by individuals, often not super technical individuals, to solve a personal problem. As a result, we will see this explosion of software and the death of SaaS. Naysayers point to the lack of many new software projects being launched as proof that agentic AI is all hype. It’s not hype. It’s just that much of this software ...

I have been working on a few new features for Artemis , the calm web reader I maintain. You can read a summary of what’s new below. Organise subscriptions with folders You can now create folders in Artemis. This feature is designed to help you organise websites you follow into separate pages in your reader. To add an author to a folder, go to the Edit page for an author, then scroll down to the “Folder” option: Set a name for the folder to which you want to add the author. Then, save your...

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment. more… Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to defen...

I'm on medical leave recovering from surgery . Before I went under, I wanted to ship one thing I'd been failing to build for months: a sponsor panel at sponsors.xeiaso.net . Previous attempts kept dying in the GraphQL swamp. This time I vibe coded it — pointed agent teams at the problem with prepared skills and let them generate the gnarly code I couldn't write myself. And it works. The GraphQL swamp Go and GraphQL are oil and water. I've held this opinion for y...

A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking models for help with Python or JavaScript appeared to give much better results than questions about less widely used languages. With the latest models running in good coding agent harnesses...

Hello, I’m back for round three of my social media protocol comparisons. I wrote v2 because of some mistakes on my part, although it’s been two years since writing it, and it’s become a bit out of date. It’s also a bit long, with a bunch of explainers and clutter right at the start of it, so for this round, I figured I’d get things up to date while shortening the text (or at least moving ramblings to footnotes) and move a lot of the explainers to the end. Hello, I’m back for round t...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of such an idea. Many people are protesting the fairness of rewriting existing projects using AI. But, a good portion of such people, during the 90s, were already in the field: they followed the final part (started in the ‘80s) of the deeds of Richard Stallman, when he and his followers were reimpleme...

A couple of weeks ago, I used Claude to vibe code three formative assessment widgets to use in Jupyter and Marimo notebooks. It took less than two hours to get them working, and another 15 minutes to build a fourth. Given how rusty my JavaScript is, and how little I know about the AnyWidget protocol, I believe it would have taken at least a couple of frustrating days to write them by hand. I only have a high-level understanding of how they work (mumble mumble traitlets mumble mumble), but since ...

Yes, you’re right AI slop is ruining the internet . Given half a chance AI will delete your inbox or worse (even if you work in Safety and Alignment at Meta): Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R — Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026 Yes, you’re right ...

I've been a reluctant Bank of America customer for over a decade. My parents chose BofA, so I chose BofA. Migrating to Chase or Wells Fargo is more of the same -- not worth the switching cost . Am I really a "customer" when they charge -0.01% interest to hold my money? BofA is clunky . Their physical branches seem simultaneously overstaffed and understaffed. Everybody there is cordial yet confused. I would never visit their physical locations if their app worked, but alas, their app ...

Because code gets cheaper and cheaper to write, this includes re-implementations. I mentioned recently that I had an AI port one of my libraries to another language and it ended up choosing a different design for that implementation. In many ways, the functionality was the same, but the path it took to get there was different. The way that port worked was by going via the test suite. Something related, but different, happened with chardet . The current maintainer reimplemented it from scra...

I’ve had this little orb here since 2006. This most recent version has the original gradient again, and a teal colour to match the current theme. This should now be in the favicon, header, and other places if you clear your cache. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-09. I’ve had this little orb here since 2006. This most recent version has the original gradient again, and a teal colour to match the current theme. This should now be in the favicon, header, and other places if you clear ...

Concept image showing how Lunar Trailblazer’s remote sensing data was to distinguish between lunar water in the form of ice crystals versus mineral-bound states. Image: Jasper Miura / Lockheed Martin Joe Palca of NPR has reported that the NASA-funded  Lunar Trailblazer  spacecraft, which was lost shortly after its February 2025 launch , failed because its solar panels were pointing perfectly away from the Sun. This chiefly happened because a) the spacecraft vendor Lockheed Martin did n...

I bought a cheap Chinese thermostat to control an infrared heating panel in my office. It ticked all the boxes except one: it's a Tuya device which requires a cloud connection. That's a big no-no for me. So I ripped it apart, soldered some leads onto the PCB and flashed ESPHome onto it. Here's how that went. I bought a cheap Chinese thermostat to control an infrared heating panel in my office. It ticked all the boxes except one: it's a Tuya device w...

Sluishuis, Amsterdam, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing Thanks to California’s Prop 13, which limits annual property tax increases to 2% over the most recent sales prices, a very large (and increasing) fraction of homes in California are transferred through inheritance. “About 18%...

A lot of the time, the software I write boils down to three phases: parse some input, run it through a state machine, and persist the result. In this kind of code, you spend a lot of time knitting your error path, hoping that it’d be easier to find the root cause during an incident. This raises the following questions: When to fmt.Errorf("doing X: %w", err) When to use %v instead of %w When to just return err There’s no consensus, and the answer changes depending on the kind...

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It? , I wanted to replicate the PTP ( Precision Time Protocol ) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock , a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ application to display PTP time (if available on the network) on a set of two LED matrix disp...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Eric Schwarz, whose blog can be found at schwarztech.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi! I'm Eric Schwarz and my online "home" has...